Talk:Spades Neil/@comment-68.174.189.120-20120828214151/@comment-950276-20120828223858
Glad you liked my response. Anyway I'll respond to each section accordingly. Spades to me is, like I said, indeed a self-insert and a shameless one at that. He is an opportunity for me to engage in the world of Teen Titans and immerse myself with that universe. That being said, and as I said before, there probably won't ever be a day where he's not a self-insert, but I don't want it to be too painfully obvious for those roleplaying with him. Like I said, if this was a serious work, I would not dare attempt a self-insert. I'd just write it in first person and call it a memoir! Now, without giving spoilers on Avro (though I may do so eventually) he serves for much more than just Spades when he tweaks out. I don't want to give away details because I don't want people reading the spoilers when I roleplay with them. However, Avro acts for the well-being of Spades, and there's a reason why. That reason has yet to be revealed. I'll happily explain in private if you so desire, but I cannot reveal it in public just yet. :P As for that fanfic... oh god it's so old and it's so badly written... One day when I'm bored I'm going to scrap it and start over from scratch and see if I can do any better. Now to detatching the backstory; Gradually, I've already been working on that. In my last edit, I nuked out a bunch of stuff, but there are some elements I'm likely to keep as they are simply too interesting. For one, there's this mysterious old woman who my grandmother used to know who claimed herself a psychic. She called me an indigo child, said 'a great power' had entered the world when I was born... It's one of those things that's just too inspiring to leave behind (and I have more spoilers with that too which I cannot reveal here!). However I've been chipping away at the storyline surrounding his foster "family" that he grew up with. For example, I have a sibling in real life. In Spades's world, so does he. That sibling however serves no real purpose so I'm going to end up just deleting her completely. As for the parents, they're sort of meager and unimportant faceless background characters that force ahead this cliché "my parents are dead, woe is me" nonsense. I want to twist that. I want to make Spades a little darker. Originally, the fire wasn't even his fault. Maybe Avro was to blame? But, perhaps I should do something like this? Maybe Avro is just protecting him from the truth of his memories. Maybe, in true, Spades was the one who set the home ablaze. Truth is, Spades (at least after my recent revisions) doesn't really give a shit that his parents are gone. It's cold. It's unnatural. Maybe he killed them, and the memory has been blocked out by Avro for all these years? (Maybe this will also give you a hint to Avro's real purpose for Spades.) Again back to 'show, don't tell' I know this is still an issue in much of my writing these days so I'll have to attempt to re-write the fan fiction before knowing how well I've advanced on that over the years. As always this is all still a work in progress and I enjoy the feedback. My appreciation for this came after a distinct lack of feedback in my college Creative Writing course. All I had were lousy, lazy students telling me, "Ohhh I like your story... I like this... I like that... this character is interesting... I like the part when..." I loathed it. Finally, in the middle of writing my mid-term, even with the full capacity to finish the mid-term, I had no desire to do so. I got perfect straight A's, and I flunked the course because at that moment I stopped giving a damn. I emailed the teacher and basically said, "I'm done with this class," and explained why. No one would actually criticize my work! Oh it was infuriating. Well that's what you get with online writing courses. No one is obligated to give a damn. Fortunately I still get my critique from sources like this wiki and later my in-class non-fiction writing course. Anyway I've gone way off on a tangent, but again, thank you for the feedback.